As part of the 2012 Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Conference, I’ll be on this awesome-looking panel:

Experimental Fiction

Session Chair:  Sean Bernard, University of La Verne Session Time:  Session 4: Saturday 8:30-10:00am Location:  SU Pigott 208

• Decompressing Comprehensibility: The Cases of William T. Vollmann and Ben Marcus

Joshua Jensen, Claremont Graduate University

Discussing the writings of William T. Vollmann and Ben Marcus, this paper asks, how do works of experimental fiction abstain from the conventional deliverance of “meaning” without becoming nonsense?

• Making Matter Matter: Tom McCarthy’s Assault on Literary Realism

Michael Miller, University of Louisville

The paper describes the ways in which Tom McCarthy’s Remainder functions as an anti-realist novel. Its deployment of non-descriptive language, flat characters, and spatially-driven narrative establishes the novel in the avant-garde category. I argue that its redefinition of the real through its emphasis on unreality makes Remainder a contemporary “realist” novel.

• Nature Has Cramped the Imagination: Experimental Fiction in the Age of Scientific Experiment

Bryan Hurt, University of Southern California

The aim of the talk is to expand our understanding of experimental fiction beyond the idea of aesthetic gameplay, something that has to do with originality or innovations in technique and style. By turning our gaze back to the 18th century, a time credited as the “birthplace” of both novel and experimental science, I plan to show that both fiction and experiment are deeply intertwined.

• The Museum of the Future

Edward Gauvin, University of Southern California

A “criti-fiction” of Calvino-esque whimsy and Borgesian paradox, in seventeen numbered sections, examining our cultural obsession with futures that never came to pass.